The Free Speech Union (FSU) has fought more than 7,000 cases since 2020 and, frankly, I thought I’d seen it all when it comes to the police overreacting to an “offensive” remark. Surely, the Metropolitan Police dispatching five armed officers to arrest Graham Linehan when he got off a flight from America for a tweet is the absolute nadir? But no. We were in court last week defending a man who was being prosecuted for saying something verboten while driving his car. The only person who heard it was his four-year-old son, yet he was charged with “threatening or abusive behavior” with a racial aggravator.
The story begins in April last year, when our member – let’s call him Craig – was driving his son back to their home in Glasgow after a day out at an amusement park in Falkirk. At around 4 p.m., when he was exiting the M80, he was cut up by another vehicle, forcing him to swerve to avoid a collision. He got the impression the other driver was drunk and called the police from his car. In due course, both vehicles stopped and the police arrived. They declined to breathalyze anyone, but took our member’s dashcam footage to see if any laws had been broken.
“Craig” told us he was being prosecuted for a thought crime, and it’s hard to disagree
A week later, the officers returned the footage and told him that an offense had indeed been committed – but by him, not the other -driver. His “crime” was muttering the words “smelly black bastard” under his breath seconds after almost being driven off the road. The windows were closed, so no one outside the vehicle could have heard him, and the other driver wasn’t looking in his direction so couldn’t have seen him say it. The only evidence against Craig was the dashcam footage he’d turned over to the police in the hope of seeing the dangerous driver brought to justice.
This is a near-perfect illustration of “anarcho-tyranny,” a phrase often used to describe contemporary Britain in which law-abiding responsible citizens are persecuted and criminals go unpunished. “How could you charge me for saying it in my car?” Craig asked the officer reading him his rights: “I was saying it to myself.” “The language was still racist,” she said.
He contacted the FSU, telling us he was being prosecuted for a thought crime, and it’s hard to disagree. This isn’t the first time we’ve defended a thought criminal but I can think of only two other cases of people being pursued by the police in similar circumstances. Funnily enough, both involve the word “pikey.”
The first concerned a couple and their daughter who were threatened and cajoled by two travelers while they were out for a drive on a single track country lane in Cambridgeshire. She made a rude gesture after a car overtook them without slowing down, and it skidded to a halt, at which point two angry-looking men leapt out and started abusing her 14- year-old daughter. The mother dialed 999 and, while on the phone, called one of the men attacking her daughter a “pikey.” To her astonishment, the police took no action against the two men but threatened to charge her with a “hate crime” if she didn’t agree to go on a racial-awareness course. We found her a good lawyer, he told the police to get knotted, and they took no further action.
The other case concerned a special constable in Hampshire who, in a WhatsApp conversation with his then boyfriend, who was house-sitting for him, told him to lock the doors to “keep the pikeys out.” After they broke up, the boyfriend submitted a complaint to the Hampshire Constabulary about his ex’s “racist” language, accompanied by a screenshot of the message, and our member was dismissed for gross misconduct. We helped with his appeal, arguing he had a reasonable expectation of privacy, given it was a conversation between him and his lover with no witnesses, but we weren’t successful. The fact that he was a volunteer with 30 years’ service and had 100 special constables under his command cut no ice with the Police Appeals Tribunal.
Happily, we got a better result in Craig’s case. To prove someone is guilty of “threatening and abusive” behavior, the Crown has to show it would be likely to cause a reasonable person fear or alarm and that the accused intended to cause fear or alarm, or was reckless as to whether it would. Given that our member said these words to himself and no one else, he was found not guilty. But what a colossal waste of everyone’s time. In Glasgow, four out of five burglaries go unsolved, while there were 11 car thefts per 10,000 people in the year to June 2026. In the Yookay, though, trying to bring criminals to justice is far more likely to get you into trouble than breaking the law.
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